Introducing Adobe Edge Web Fonts

As part of our efforts to make web fonts more broadly accessible and easy to use, we’re excited to introduce Adobe Edge Web Fonts, a new free web font service.

Edge Web Fonts features hundreds of web fonts, including a sampling of fonts from the Adobe library as well as a large collection of open source fonts. Under the hood, the service is powered by Typekit: it uses the same standards-based method of serving fonts and makes use of the same global font serving network for speed and stability. But it’s completely free and requires no account or kit configuration — making it faster and easier to get started.

Google Web Fonts and Edge Web Fonts

We’ve partnered with Google to make many of the open source fonts originally commissioned by the Google Web Fonts project available through Edge Web Fonts. At the same time, Adobe is contributing two open source fonts of its own — the recent Source Sans Pro and, announced today, Source Code Pro — to both the Adobe Edge Web Fonts and Google Web Fonts services.

In addition, Adobe will be applying its considerable font expertise to improving and optimizing a number of the open source fonts that are available in both Google Web Fonts and Edge Web Fonts. The teams from Typekit, Adobe Type, and Google Web Fonts are working to identify which fonts will benefit the most from our attention, and how we can best approach improving their rendering and performance. Efforts will include hinting some fonts for better rendering at smaller sizes, plus a number of other optimizations. All of these contributions will themselves remain open source.

We’re excited to be part of these efforts, and are glad to be once again partnering with our friends at Google to improve fonts on the web. Read more from Google here.

Available now

Starting today, you can use Edge Web Fonts in both Adobe Muse and Edge Code, a code editor based on the open source Brackets project. Next up, Edge Web Fonts will be available in the soon-to-be-released Edge Reflow, a tool for creating responsive CSS layouts and more. More integrations are upcoming with Adobe’s Edge Tools & Services.

But Edge Web Fonts isn’t limited to Edge tools — you’re free to use it with whichever tools you prefer. You can preview some of the best of the fonts here, where you’ll also find instructions on how to use them in your web projects. We’ve also made a list of all of the fonts in the Edge Web Fonts library available.

More tools for working with Edge Web Fonts are just around the corner. Stay tuned.

We still do recommend the protocol-relative URL for deployment on the web. However, we discovered during development that local development on “file://” was a significant use case for some of the integrations, and the protocol-relative URL obviously isn’t a good choice in that case. We have more detail on protocols and how to choose based on your situation in the documentation.

Awesome work ! Love the tie up with Google fonts.
Can you help me out with how we can integrate the new fonts from Adobe Edge Web Fonts into Adobe Muse ?
I am a bit puzzled and overwhelmed and will appreciate if you can point me to a tutorial or video or something. Thanks !

This is awesome! One major drawback for me, however, is the lack of a way to view the font repertoire – I work on a non-profit multilingual website with very wide character set usage and it would be invaluable for me to be able to rank fonts based on Unicode ranges or even just the number of glyphs.

Some of the fonts do contain some Eastern European characters. While we do not yet offer a way to browse/search the fonts by which languages they support, you can access characters for all of the languages each font supports by using the “all” subset when loading fonts, instead of the default subset. Check out the Subsets section of the documentation for more details.

Actually, Typekit doesn’t load fonts with JavaScript for DRM reasons. Instead, we use JavaScript because of the font loading benefits it makes possible, which ultimately result in a better experience. We’ve written in detail about this here.

The improvements Adobe makes to the fonts that are in both the Google Web Fonts library and the Edge Web Fonts library will be available in both places.

Reasons you might consider using one of the services instead of the other include 1) access to different fonts (the libraries do no exactly mirror each other), 2) access to different font loading options (for example, the default subset behavior is different in the two services — see the URL Specification in the Edge Web Fonts documentation for details on how it works in Edge Web Fonts), or 3) Edge Web Fonts is integrated in customized ways into some Adobe tools you might want to use (for example, Edge Code, Muse, and, soon, Reflow and others).

But Edge Web Fonts is not intended to be competitive towards Google Web Fonts. Rather, Adobe and Google share the goal of improving the web by enabling more web font adoption. We hope to push that cause forward, in part, by introducing more/different types of designers/developers to web fonts.

Point nr. 1 is most interesting to me (#2 is interesting and #3 is really just about preference).

Will you have a nice gallery, so I can show it to my designers? Something similar to what Peter Chon (thanks btw!) did, but subsetting characters (& especially testing non-latin characters) would be nice.

How about STIX fonts? They are free and essential for any kind of “scientific” content on the web. Embedding them by hand and serving from own domain is pain, using TypeKit scripting and CDN would be great help to man kind.

I’ve also made a little tool to preview the fonts: http://edgefonts.toekneestuck.com It’s paginated so it doesn’t kill your browser, you can view each variant/style, and also set custom preview text :)

While we don’t yet offer a way to browse/search the fonts by OpenType feature support, some of the fonts do have some OpenType features. Be sure to use the “all” subset (instead of the “default”) when loading fonts in order to get access to whatever OpenType features a font contains. Note also that not all browsers support OpenType features yet, but their support is growing. Check out the Subsets section of the documentation for more details on subsets.

We hope to expand coverage in the future. In the meantime: some of the fonts do contain some Central/Eastern European characters. While we do not yet offer a way to browse/search the fonts by which languages they support, you can access all of the languages each font supports by using the “all” subset when loading fonts, instead of the default subset. So, when working with fonts and looking for Central European characters, please make sure to use the “all” subset. Check out the Subsets section of the documentation for more details.

Adding new characters to a typeface requires both design skill (because the new glyphs must be drawn) and technical skill (because the new glyphs must be added to the typeface’s font files and optimized). If you have these skills, I’d love to chat with you. If so, can you email me at gregveen@adobe.com? Thanks!

Thanks for the report! The browser/OS support details for Edge Web Fonts are outlined in the documentation. We don’t support every specific WebKit variant at this point, but that may change in the future.

Gregory Veen

Co-founder of Typekit, where I work on product and business development. Designer and developer of websites and software since 1994 for companies like Google, Twitter, and others. @gregveen on Twitter.